Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of collaborative computing and more particularly to instant messaging in a collaborative computing environment.
Description of the Related Art
The recent rapid development of the Internet has led to advanced modes of synchronous, real-time collaboration able to fulfill the real-time communicative requirements of the modern computing participant. Using the Internet or a corporate intranet as a backbone, individuals worldwide can converge in real-time in cyberspace to share ideas, documents and images in a manner not previously possible through conventional telephony and video conferencing.
To facilitate collaboration over the Internet, a substantial collection of synchronous messaging technologies and protocols have been assembled to effectively deliver audio, video and data over the single data communications medium of the Internet. These synchronous messaging technologies include several, real-time human-to-human collaborative environments such as instant messaging and persistent chat rooms. The common messaging space can accommodate a pair of users to a chat, or multiple users to a conference. In some circumstances, the initiation of the chat can be spontaneous upon one user's recognizing the presence and availability of a partner user. In other circumstances, the initiation of the chat can be planned and can even subsist in a calendared event in a calendaring and scheduling system.
Amongst often used collaborative components in a collaborative environment, instant messaging remains of paramount importance. In instant messaging systems, users are provided with instant messaging client software, which allows them to communicate via an instant messaging server with other users. Although instant messaging systems allow users to communicate with each other in real-time, these existing instant messaging systems have several deficiencies with regard to harmonizing instant message communications sometimes, especially preventing ambiguity in questions and answers between different collaborators.
Consider an example of a user who has a number of questions the user wants to discuss with another user via instant messaging. When involved in a chat session, a user may send multiple questions to another user. In such a case, it is easy for one user to reply to one question and type another, while the other user is still answering the first question. As can be appreciated, even though the typical user interface of an instant messaging client displays the messages in chronological order, displaying questions and answers in chronological order may not be helpful since it is fairly easy to overlook multiple questions with their corresponding answers which are usually out of logical order in a single chat window. This can lead to confusion in carrying out an ongoing session as well as difficulty in reading a stored log of the chat transcript.